For many years, those skilled in the art of food preparation, particularly in the formulation of sauces and gravies, especially for use in packaged, convenience type, meat or fish-in-sauce or gravy food products, have sought to develop sauces and gravies possessing certain desirable properties. They have also sought to overcome or prevent the occurrence of certain specific problems arising in the preparation of and during the course of storage of products utilizing such compositions.
Such sauces and gravies desirably have the properties of thickness, smoothness, resistance to thermal shock and stability during storage. Resistance to thermal shock is evidenced by maintenance of consistency during variations in temperature which can range from hot to cold and back to hot during the course of preparation, storage and final serving. Stability is measured by the maintenance of aesthetic appeal and the non-occurrence of such phenomena as fat-cap formation and gel formation in the combined meat-in-sauce packaged food product during preparation or over long periods of time during the storage phase.
Customarily, modified starches, gelatin and gums such as carragheenin extract have been some of the ingredients used as thickening agents.
Thus, U.S. Pat. No. 3,598,614 discloses the use of a mixed starch, mixed starch plus gelatin or a mixture of agar and gelatin as a thickener for liquid soy sauce. The mixed starches, one of which must contain amylopectin and the other, both amylose and amylopectin, are typified by a mixture of "glutinous" rice starch or "waxy" corn starch with tapioca, corn, potato or "common" rice starches. Glutinous rice starch is also commonly known as "waxy" or "sweet" rice "flour". Where the starch mixture is used as the thickener, the final thickened soy sauce contains from about 3 to 15% by weight of the starch mixture which is made up from about 25 to 50% of the amylopectin-containing ingredient and from about 75 to 50% of the amylose/amylopectin-containing ingredient. Where the mixed starch is used as the thickener, it is thus evident that a high proportion of that mixture must be used to attain the desired degree of thickness to cause the thickened sauce of that invention to adhere to the food onto which it is applied and not run-off.
Similarly, U.S. Pat. No. 3,266,908 discloses a process for preparing concentrated poultry sauce or gravy compositions in which rice flour is used as a thickening agent. The products of that invention, however, contain a substantial percentage of actual poultry meat or poultry by-products and may be packaged in dry powder form for later reconstitution with water or milk, as a frozen semi-liquid or as canned gravies.
U.S. Pat. No. 3,681,094 requires the use of gelatin in the gravy mixture to give it a semi-rigid rubbery consistency necessary to support the solid phase food according to the packaging scheme of that invention.
The use of thickening agents alone, however, is not enough to achieve the unctuousness or smoothness characteristic of the sauces prepared by the great chefs. Moreover, the consistency of such sauces varies greatly with temperature. This lack of thermal stability and resistance to thermally induced shocks typically causes thermal decomposition or aesthetic changes which are an unfavorable factor from the perspective of consumer acceptability.
The food processing industry has also recognized the existence of other physical and chemical change producing conditions that may occur during the preparation and/or storage phases of such meat-in-gravy type food products. Typically, the industry has sought to overcome such problems by the inclusion of various additives or preservatives in the product to minimize or prevent these changes from occurring.
Thus, for example, U.S. Pat. No. 3,843,815 discloses the use of an acid additive in a meat-in-gravy product to inhibit the formation of gelatin in the gravy during its preparation and to prevent subsequent gellification of the gravy in the container during storage. Gellification is caused by collagen in the food which has cooked out combining with moisture in the gravy.
Weak acids such as phosphoric, citric, succinic, tartaric, fumaric, adipic, acetic and lactic may be used to prevent the problem from occurring, but care must be taken to control the level of acid used to avoid significantly reducing the pH of the product, which, in turn, would produce other undesirable palatability and/or aesthetic side effects.
Similarly, U.S. Pat. No. 3,836,685 discloses the use of a filler material incorporated with the meat portion of a packaged meat-in-gravy product to prevent migration of fat from the meat upon heating the contents, thereby avoiding the formation of a "fat-cap" or layer of fat at the surface of the contents upon cooling down after cooking.
In short, it can be said that the use of previously known thickening agents alone is insufficient to give the prepared sauces and gravies all the desired qualities and the use of specific additives to overcome various problems that occur in the preparation and storage of food products that incorporate such compositions is at best an expedient measure that often complicates matters by curing one problem but causing others.
The ideal sauce or gravy composition is one that achieves the desired results with the minimum of ingredients not essential to the gustatory aspects of the product. Moreover, it is preferable that such ingredients be "natural", as opposed to synthetic chemical additives.
We have discovered that novel mixtures of two such "natural" ingredients, namely, rice starch and carob-bean flour, when incorporated into sauce and gravy formulations, yield compositions of the highest quality possessing all the desirable gustatory and aesthetic characteristics and demonstrating none of the commonly experienced preparation and/or storage problems.
We have also developed a method for preparing food products utilizing these compositions. Until now, no one has been able to develop a simplified, integrated process for producing both the food and the sauce. Thus, although U.S. Pat. No. 3,597,228 discusses a process for preparing precooked poultry pieces which may be packaged in a reheatable container with any of various sauces, those sauces must either be prepared separately or obtained from another source, already premixed and ready for use, for inclusion in those product embodiments so requiring them. The cooking process disclosed in that invention, moreover, is a somewhat complicated two-step process involving both microwave and hot-oil cooking steps. The second cooking step of that invention is required to give the cooked food the desired aesthetic qualities, especially a "browned" appearance such as results from conventional cooking methods and which is unattainable by microwave cooking alone.
Contrastingly, in the food preparation process of the present invention, we have been able to develop an integrated overall process wherein the novel sauce compositions of this invention can be prepared and utilized together with portions of cooked meat or fish to form convenient, reheatable packaged meat-or-fish-in-sauce products of the highest culinary quality. This process is advantageous in that it allows the simultaneous preparation of both food and sauce in separate but integrable steps, thereby increasing the efficiency of the operation and eliminating any dependence on outside sources of supply for the sauces. The efficiency of our process is further enhanced by the fact that the food cooking operation is simplified to a single step based on conventional cooking means, thus also resulting in products with desirable aesthetic appeal.